What is Fedora Core?

Fedora Core is a Linux distribution based upon Red Hat Linux. Fedora Core is available for free download, and free support is provided by the Fedora community. Fedora Core is considered a test bed for upcoming Red Hat releases, specifically RHEL. Thus, many experimental or bleeding-edge technologies are included in the distro, such as SELinux, AIGLX, and IPv6. Additionally, Fedora is composed of 100% open source software, although repositories of extra software that is not open source are also available via third parties.

Although there is an official Fedora Core mailing list and official forum, the support is provided by a community of volunteers with no obligation to help. That said, the Fedora support is well known to be among the best in the Linux and open source communities, with Red Hat engineers participating in discussions and problem solving. In addition to the English language Fedora Users mailing list, there are separate lists for over 50 different Fedora components and other languages. Although the main Fedora Users mailing list is very high traffic (over 200 messages per day), most of the other lists are small enough to safely subscribe to without becoming overwhelming.

In addition to the Fedora Core Linux distribution, Red Hat sponsors the Fedora Extras software repository. In this repository users have access to open source software that is not included with Fedora Core such as Abiword, Easytag, ClamAV, Bluefish, Anjuta, Koffice, Moodle, Seamonkey, and literally thousands of other open source programs. Users interested in installing software not covered by an open source licence, such as the Opera web browser or libraries necessary for mp3 playback, can enable third party repos such as Livna, Dag, Freshrpms and countless others. Note that while all of the repositories are compatible with Fedora Extras, they are not all compatible with each other.